Rufus W. Adams, a descendant of some of the earliest pioneers of Carson Valley, Nevada, was born in 1914. His grandfather, John Quincy Adams, arrived in Genoa in the 1850s to establish a ranch home that became a valley landmark. Rufus Adams lives...

Harry Hunt Atkinson was raised in the Salt Lake City area where he was born in 1881. He had fond memories of surveying the Utah desert and of his excellent schooling in the gentile schools of that preponderantly Mormon city. Mr. Atkinson later went...

Carson Valley is a level plain eighteen miles in width lying along a thirty-mile stretch of the Carson River in west central Nevada. Bounded on the east by the Pine Nut Range and to the west by the towering Sierra Nevada, it is a sheltered,...

Leonard William Blumstrom is a retired Reno postal supervisor. Mr. Blumstrom was born in Utah in 1911. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Tonopah, Nevada, where his father worked as a miner in the Tonopah Extension mine. An explosion in...

Emigration to the United States from Greece was chiefly a movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During these decades Greece waged a crusade for the union of Crete, Macedonia, and the Aegean Islands, yet despite the local...

Joseph F. McDonald has had an unusually rich and varied life, stretching over almost seventy years of Nevada's history. A native of Colorado, he was born in 1891, and his life initially revolved around lumber and mining camps. He came to Nevada in...

Arnold R. Trimmer, a native of California, spent nearly his entire life in Carson Valley. His parents moved from Diamond Valley, California, to the historic Frey ranch at the outskirts of Genoa in 1909, when he was a child of four. Mr. Trimmer...

Through the Glass Ceiling—A Life in Nevada Politics is the oral history of Sue Wagner, who served in the assembly in the 1970s, in the senate in the 1980s, and was elected lieutenant governor in 1991, serving one term. She became involved in...

Alice Mildred Hinch Byrne, a native of Virginia City, Nevada, was born September 28, 1908, into a mining family that could trace its roots back two generations on the Comstock. She has lived in the Virginia City area all of her life. In 1924 she...

Silvio Petricciani was born in Reno on December 1, 1917. His parents, John and Julia Petricciani, had emigrated to northern California from Livorgno, Italy, and then to Reno. Soon after their arrival, John purchased the Palace Club building on the...

Jean Ford was born in 1929 into an era of major transformations for women in the United States. During her lifetime doors were opening for a few bold and talented women whose actions changed the roles women would play in our country. Jean's life...

A Liberal Conscience is the life story of a man who wanted to do something for his home state, and did. Ralph Denton is a classic “man behind the scenes.” Although he has practiced law for half a century—first in Elko, Nevada, from 1951 to 1955,...

Intervention by federal and state governments, the growth of corporate practice, and astonishing technical advancements have contributed to increasing impersonalization in medical care. It was not always thus. In 1938, when Dr. Leslie Moren began...

From Territorial days to the present, Italian immigrants and their descendants have played important roles in shaping life in northern Nevada. For much of that time they constituted the largest and most influential ethnic group in the region. In...

Louie A. Gardella, closely identified with Nevada agriculture for more than forty years, is a native of Nevada, born in 1908. He proudly claims his birthplace as the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, while equally proudly reciting an Italian...

In popular myth, anyone can make it to the top in America, no matter how humble his or her origins. That may be true, but few have faced greater challenges along the way than did Rollan Melton. Sonny, as he was called when he was young, was born...

The Women’s Athletics oral history project began in 2005 with the decision of Pack PAWS—the longstanding booster, fundraising, and watchdog organization for the University of Nevada women’s intercollegiate athletics program—to produce a history of...

Since the 1860s ranchers have raised hay and run livestock on rocky but well-watered meadows astride the confluence of Galena and Jones creeks a few miles south of Reno. However, the site is now becoming more valued for its scenic vistas and its...

In the autumn of 1989, the University of Nevada Oral History Program was informed that the American Folklife Center, a department of the Library of Congress, held in its collection numerous audio tapes made in Virginia City in 1949 and 1950. The...